And not simply a huge increase in the number of new inventions but a radical transformation in the process of invention itself.14
In June 1770, Hargreaves submitted a patent application, number 962, for a version of the spinning jenny that could spin, draw, and twist sixteen threads simultaneously. The delay between this patent application and his first prototypes meant that others were already using the jenny by the time his patent was granted, making it difficult for him to enforce his patent rights. Even worse, the machine made enemies.
Starting in Hargreaves’s native Lancashire, the spinning jenny’s magical multiplication of productivity was initially, as you might expect, little welcomed by the local artisans, whose guilds had controlled production for centuries—they hated it. As yarn prices started to fall and opposition from local spinners grew, one mob came to his house and burned the frames for twenty new machines.

…

Ironically, this is almost a return to the very earliest days of the First Industrial Revolution. The spinning jenny changed the world not by creating the manufacturing plant, but by creating the cottage industry. And the cottage industry can be a very powerful economic force indeed.
What we now know as cottage industries (originally known as “the domestic system” or “outwork system”) began with wooden-framed machines with foot pedals that could make many threads at the same time, essentially acting like many spinning wheels operating simultaneously. They were relatively easy to build or cheap to buy, and could be operated in a table-sized space. In a sense, they were the “desktop manufacturing” of the day.
The spinning jenny was used in the home, multiplying the work of one spinner manyfold, and for the first time making indoor work more lucrative than outdoor work for much of the population.

…

For some reason it kept spinning, and something about the contraption still working in the unfamiliar orientation triggered a vision in Hargreaves’s mind: a line of spindles, side by side, spinning multiple threads of cotton from flax simultaneously. When he returned home, he started whittling up just such a machine from spare wood, with the spindles connected by a series of belts and pulleys. Many versions later, he had invented the spinning jenny, a pedal-powered device that could allow a single operator to spin eight threads at the same time (jenny was Lancashire slang for “machine”).
The machine amplified the output of a single worker by a factor of eight at the start, and could easily be expanded beyond that. And this was just the beginning.
There was nothing new about textile-making machines themselves. The ancient Egyptians had looms, after all, and the Chinese had silk-spinning frames as early as 1000 BCE.

In 1675, weavers in Spitalfields attacked engines (not, of course, steam-powered) able to multiply the efforts of a single worker. Not only was Richard Hargreaves’s original spinning jenny destroyed57 in 1767, but so also was his new and improved version in 1769.
Nor was the phenomenon exclusively British. Machine breaking in France was at least as frequent, and probably even more consequential, though it can be hard to tease out whether the phenomenon contributed to, or was a symptom of, some of the uglier aspects of the French Revolution. Normandy in particular,58 which was not only close to England but the most “English” region of France, was the site of dozens of incidents in 1789 alone. In July, hundreds of spinning jennys were destroyed, along with a French version of Arkwright’s water frame. In October, an attorney in Rouen applauded the destruction of “the machines used in cotton-spinning59 that have deprived many workers of their jobs.”

…

While visiting a friend, Hargreaves observed a spinning wheel that had been knocked down; with the wheel and spindle in a vertical position, rather than their then-traditional horizontal one, they continued to revolve. In a flash, Hargreaves imagined25 a line of spindles, upright and side by side, spinning multiple threads simultaneously.
Nearly fifty years later, the first description of the spinning jenny (“jenny” is a dialect term for “engine” in Lancashire) appeared in the September 1807 issue of The Athenaeum, in which readers learned that the first one was made “almost wholly with a pocket knife.26 It contained eight spindles, and the clasp by which the thread was drawn out was the stalk of a briar split in two.” The result is not just a romantic tale; the jenny immediately delivered an eightfold increase of the amount of yarn that a single spinner could produce.

…

As would be subsequently revealed, Kay had invented the new spinning machine in much the same way that John Lombe had invented the silk mill. Given the rather fluid attitudes of the day concerning intellectual property, it’s probably too much to say that he stole the design, but he certainly borrowed it, from a Lancashire reed maker and weaver named Thomas Highs, who may even have a claim on the invention of the spinning jenny (Highs’s daughter, Jane,33 always maintained that it was named for her). Whatever his contribution to the jenny, he was clearly responsible for the design of the machine that Kay reproduced—from memory—for Arkwright, since two years before, Highs had hired the clockmaker to turn his wooden model into a working machine made of iron.
Fig. 6: This is the diagram that accompanied Arkwright’s patent application, which became the 931st patent awarded by Britain, in July 1769.

The chronometer allowed navigators at sea to determine longitude and latitude by providing an accurate representation of time at a particular location.
LIGHTNING ROD (1750)
Ben Franklin first proposed the idea of a lightning rod in a letter written in 1750, and his descriptions were ultimately translated into French. The first test of Franklin’s theoretical design was actually implemented in France in 1752.
SPINNING JENNY (1764)
A longstanding debate questions whether James Hargreaves was the true inventor of the spinning jenny, a machine that greatly improved the efficiency of the cotton industry. Some evidence suggests that Hargreaves was merely improving the design of an artisan named Thomas Highs. What is clear is that the Hargreaves design was greatly improved upon in the years following the production of his first model by weavers throughout Northern England.

If you thought about this idea for a moment, it sounded an awful lot like the industrial revolutions of recent years.
When James Hargreaves had invented the spinning jenny in Lancashire in the 1760s, for instance, the spinner could now spin yarn twenty times more efficiently than if she had been using her old spinning wheel. That new spinning jenny not only revolutionized how quickly a spinner could produce yarn. It also meant the spinning wheel would now only be useful for burning. It had become, in a word, obsolete. And as Hargreaves’s jenny had replaced the wheel and made it useful only as firewood, so, a few years later, the spinning jenny became obsolete – as the new spinning frame made much stronger yarn.
Once you had noticed this happening with the process of producing yarn, you would also see that it was a natural part of the progress of other industries.

Not
surprisingly, in 1755, a mob broke into John Kay’s house and
destroyed one of his looms, but fortunately, he had a few spare.
Making thread or yarn, on the other hand, remained old
fashioned. Shear a sheep, and then wind the wool on a spinning wheel.
Invented who knows how many centuries before, as quaint as could be.
But as weavers demanded more yarn of higher quality, they substituted
cotton from the New World for expensive wool.
Along came the Spinning Jenny. Invented in 1764 by James
Hargreaves, it combined eight and eventually 80 spindles of wool into a
thread strong enough to sew with. Hargreaves got the idea (or at least
according to legend) when his daughter Jenny knocked over the family
spinning wheel and had to chase it through the house. When local
spinners heard of the invention, they broke into his home in Lancashire
and busted the Jenny up, the wooden one.

…

They destroyed several
stocking frames, considering the frames a threat to their jobs as
artisans. These so-called Luddites were not the first and certainly not
the last group to feel threatened by automation. But all you have to do
is look at Arkwright’s Water Frame factory and cottages to figure out
that automation creates plenty of new jobs.
Still, the yarn from a Water Frame was thick and the thread
from the Spinning Jenny was coarse. One can only imagine how itchy
clothing was in 1775, not just clothes from wool but cotton as well.
Royalty still insisted on silk, it beat scratching and twitching all day.
Comfortable clothing was yet another thing that separated the rich
from the poor.
32
HOW WE GOT HERE
Tailors were interested in a yarn that was strong, smooth and
soft, to replace expensive silk. In 1775, an inventor named Samuel
Crompton crossed the Jenny and the Water Frame and invented the
Spinning Mule.

…

By 1790, 400 spindles hung off the Spinning Mule, and no man
or mule or horse or even running water could keep up with the power
needed to run one of these things. Boulton & Watt steam engines to the
rescue. The Spinning Mule was a breakout device. It was just what the
textile business needed: cheap, smooth material. And of course, it was
just what Boulton and Watt needed, something to soak up lots and lots
of horsepower.
***
The Carding Engine stripped the fibers into cardings. Spinning
Jennies created thread. Water Frames created yarn. Spinning Mules
turned out smooth yarn and thread. Looms were still run by hand. So,
around the time Watt was extending his steam engine patent 25 years
to 1800, all but the weaving step of textile manufacturing was under
mechanical power that steam engines could run.
In 1785, Edmund Cartwright sought to fix this problem by
applying mechanical power to hand looms.

This seems like an unusually straightforward case, but on closer inspection the same turns out to be true of many of the Industrial Revolution’s technological advances. Cotton-spinning machinery, for example, did not require any scientific knowledge, just a careful process of development and experimentation plus a little creativity: Legend has it that the spinning jenny was inspired by a traditional medieval spinning wheel that fell over and kept spinning while lying on the ground. The inventors of spinning machines such as the spinning jenny and the water frame launched serious research programs; they knew exactly what they hoped to achieve, and just needed to solve a series of modest engineering problems.
They expended this considerable effort rationally—and those in France or China rationally did not—because the financials added up: Allen’s calculations show that British workers were at that time the most highly paid in the world, whether measured against the price of silver, of food, of energy, or of capital.

…

They expended this considerable effort rationally—and those in France or China rationally did not—because the financials added up: Allen’s calculations show that British workers were at that time the most highly paid in the world, whether measured against the price of silver, of food, of energy, or of capital. That meant that they were big consumers of imported cotton, but also that a labor-saving device would pay dividends. In Britain, a spinning jenny cost less than five months’ wages, while in low-wage France it cost more than a year’s wages. It was cheap French labor that accounted for the machine’s slow take-up on the continent, not the superior scientific ingenuity or commercial acumen of the British.
That was even more true of steam engines. They were, unusually for Industrial Revolution technology, based on an actual scientific advance: Galileo discovered that atmosphere had weight and so could exert pressure. Yet the practical invention took place in Britain, not Galileo’s Italy, and again, the reason was neither genius nor an entrepreneurial culture but the fact that labor was expensive and fuel was incredibly cheap.

In 1764, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, which
Pressure Drop
65
wound strands of cotton into thread. Around the same time,
Richard Arkwright invented and patented a device named the Spinning Frame to wind thread into bundles of yarn. Although the Spinning Frame was originally designed to be hand cranked, Arkwright
ended up needing horses to operate it, and even they proved not to
be powerful enough, so he moved the whole thing riverside, changing the machine’s name to a Water Frame. Around 1785, Arkwright
was visited by Boulton and became one of the early manufacturers
to use Watt’s engine. Make power cheap enough, and someone new
will ﬁgure out how to use it.
The yarn from a Water Frame was thick, and the thread from the
spinning jenny was coarse. Common folk wore clothes that were
basically like burlap—what they wouldn’t have done for smooth
underwear.

Its fibers were easier to work with than those of wool, silk, or flax, and its market was huge. The goal was to mechanize the movements made by the hands and arms of the spinners and weavers.
Four men, working independently, transformed textile making with their inventions of the spinning jenny, the spinning mule, and the power loom, all designed to speed up the process of turning wool into thread and thread into cloth. Their differing success epitomizes the mixed fate of inventors. Both James Hargreaves and Thomas Arkwright came up with the spinning jenny, a simple device that multiplied the spindles of yarn spun by one wheel. Once it was in operation, the number of additional spindles went quickly from eight to eighty. Hargreaves was a weaver, but Arkwright had better connections to backers and was able to set up a factory where he successfully brought six hundred workers, many of them women and children, under one roof.

…

Edmund Cartwright, a country clergyman and graduate of Oxford, became absorbed with the weaving process after visiting a cotton spinning mill. A year later, in 1785, he patented a power loom that used steam power to operate a regular loom for making cloth. It became the prototype of the modern loom. Although Cartwright built a weaving mill, he went bankrupt. Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, which, as the name suggests, combined two inventions, the spinning jenny and the power loom. He had to sell the rights to his mule because he was too poor to pay for the patenting process.
Steam power gave the British the competitive edge in textile making, particularly cotton. They could undersell almost all Indian and Chinese producers. The market for cotton was global, and England’s fabrics were so cheap that they were able to break open many of the world’s protected markets.

…

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Yorkshire laborers whose families had sheared sheep for generations smashed the shearing frames that were undermining their way of life. They took the name of an earlier resister, Ned Lud. These Luddites declared war on the machines that violated venerable work routines and banished comfort and conviviality from the workplace.
Actually woolen clothmakers in the west of England had earlier embarked on a serious effort to thwart clothiers from introducing the spinning jenny. Menacingly, this device could do the work of twenty spinners. These craftsmen had the advantage of a long tradition of regulation in the woolen trade, so they called upon Parliament to enforce laws that had been on the books for generations. After a decade of petitioning, lobbying, and pamphleteering clothmakers finally secured a parliamentary inquiry. These workers were fighting to retain an old and stable way of life; their employers, to enhance profits by saving labor costs.

For instance,
Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing press of the ﬁfteenth
century clearly facilitated the diffusion of knowledge that made the
Industrial Revolution—and its necessary technological innovations
and inventions—possible in the ﬁrst place.
Among the other facilitating technologies of the Industrial Revolution was James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, a spinning frame with
multiple spindles that vastly increased production volume in the textile industry. Combined with the ﬂying shuttle, the spinning jenny
took the textile industry into the next competitive era. James Watt’s
late eighteenth-century steam engine changed most industries using
mechanical power, especially transportation and agriculture, quite signiﬁcantly. The previous costs of producing this mechanical power, no
matter the application, were generally higher than the costs of heating
water to steam, and thus enormous cost savings were realized and
industrial and transportation projects became more feasible.

In fact, we can easily trace three eras of automation, based on the types of work they have brought machines forth to challenge. First, machines relieved humans of work that was manually exhausting and mentally enervating. This was the story of the late industrial revolution, which, having pulled all those workers off farms and into factories, proceeded to make most of them unnecessary with contraptions like the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, and the power loom. And it’s a process that continues around the world. Consider Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturing subcontractor to global electronics brands like Apple. Starting in 2011, it started putting robots on the lines to perform welding, polishing, and such tasks—ten thousand of them that first year. In 2013, Chairman Terry Gou noted at Foxconn’s annual meeting that the firm now employed over a million people.

…

The step-in job of today probably won’t even be very much like the one of tomorrow.
The Future of Stepping In Is Bright
We think that anyone who’s capable of stepping into automated decision systems should do so. In general, the future for this group is very bright. It’s as if we’re in the early days of the industrial revolution, and there are very few mechanics for the power looms and spinning jennies that inventors have come up with. Those who know how to set up, get running, and maintain these new machines are going to be in huge demand. We certainly haven’t found any people with this focus and set of capabilities that are out of a job today.
Perhaps we should include here the obligatory complaint that there aren’t enough STEM graduates, at least in the United States, to fill out the ranks of the stepping-in role in the future.

They replaced 40,000 tractors.12
The decline of the ‘mule’ spinning machine
The twentieth century has seen the decline in use of many industrial machines. A good example is the cotton-spinning machine that dominated the most important cotton industry existing in 1900 – the ‘mule’ spinning machine of the British cotton industry. The ‘mule’, invented in the early nineteenth century, was so-called because it was a hybrid of two different types of spinning machines – it used the stretching motion of the spinning ‘jenny’ and the roller action of the ‘water-frame’. Each twentieth-century mule had around 1,500 spindles, and each pair of mules was operated by the male spinner and his two assistants, called the ‘big piecer’ and the ‘little piecer’.
The spinning mule was at the centre of what was a globalised industry. Cotton was processed thousands of miles from where it was grown and was exported from a few industrial centres to the whole world.

Hanway was not much interested in the Englishness of the infants, only that 47 per cent died before the age of two.
While social pleading depended on debate and Parliament’s whim, the industrial upheaval brought added miseries. Take, for example, the plight of hand spinners. In 1765 James Hargreaves, a carpenter and weaver, produced his most famous invention and named it after his wife. It was to be called the spinning-jenny. By using eight spindles driven by a great wheel, Hargreaves revolutionized the methods of the textile industry. And just like those who, 200 years on, viewed automation with dismay, the spinners understood perfectly that their livelihoods would never be the same again. This era was the beginning of what is now called the Industrial Revolution. And inventiveness was not confined to the industrial drawing board: musicians, writers, painters and diarists were prolific, and to be found at every coffee house, salon and studio.

The second and third of these increased in quantity in the nineteenth century,* but it was the qualitative improvement that really mattered – the fact that total output exceeded the combined increments of workers and mills. In terms of supply, then, the Industrial Revolution was a hunt for efficiency. James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1766), Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1769), Samuel Crompton’s mule (1779), Edmund Cartwright’s steam-powered loom (1787) and Richard Roberts’s self-acting mule (1830): these were all ways of making more thread or cloth per man-hour. The spinning jenny, for example, allowed a single worker simultaneously to spin cotton yarn with eight spindles. Thanks to these innovations, the unit price of British cotton manufactures declined by approximately 90 per cent between the mid-1790s and 1830.7 The same applied to the other key breakthroughs in iron production and steam-power generation.

But in fact his system was no more than a cumbersome, complex version of Pacioli’s and has been summarised as follows: instead of two columns in the ledger, make ten; and then in all essential points proceed as directed by Pacioli. Jones and his claims for the labour-saving virtues of his system were so persuasive they almost undid his book’s potential success: in an era of rioting provoked by the introduction of labour-replacing machinery such as the power loom and the spinning jenny, the public worried that the purported efficiency of Jones’s system—‘the most extensively useful invention which had ever made its appearance’—would put bookkeepers out of work. Once Jones had reassured them that no such thing would happen, that no jobs would be lost through the adoption of his system, his book, ‘by unblushing impudence’, went on to find phenomenal success.
Jones’ English System became the first English work on accounting to achieve international fame.

Arkwright, the youngest of thirteen children, had first displayed his entrepreneurial talent when he began collecting human hair, dyeing it using his own secret formula, and then fashioning it into wigs. The success of this business provided him with the means to embark on a more ambitious venture, and in 1767 he began developing a "spinning frame." This was a machine for spinning thread in preparation for weaving; but unlike the spinning jenny, a hand-operated device that required a skilled operator, the spinning frame was to be a powered machine that anyone could operate. With the help of a clockmaker, John Kay, from whom he gleaned details of an earlier design, Arkwright built a working prototype and established his first spinning mill, powered by horses, in 1768. This mill so impressed two wealthy businessmen that they gave Arkwright the funds to build a far larger one on a river at Cromford, where the spinning frames would be powered by a waterwheel.

In the poorest ones, child labour is still prevalent, while a lot of people are still tenants of semi-feudal landlords. Anything between 30 per cent and 90 per cent of the workforce in these countries may be self-employed, many of whom are engaged in subsistence farming.
* Yes, that’s the scientist, who also doubled as an alchemist and a stock market speculator.
* These included the flying shuttle (1733) and spinning jenny (1764) in the textile industry, coke-smelting (1709) in steel-making and various processes for large-scale sulphuric-acid manufacture (the 1730s and the 1740s) in the chemical industry.
* To simplify the story, the 1932 famine happened because too much food was shipped out of the rural areas, following the 1928 agricultural collectivization. The rapidly rising urban population had to be fed, and grains had to be exported to earn foreign exchanges with which to import advanced machinery that the Soviet Union needed for industrialization

This might suggest that aspects of the religious climate into which William Smith was born—and that he was to help start changing—are now starting to return.
* Smith was to feel somewhat embarrassed in later years about his forebears’ determined ordinariness, and he tried long and hard to prove that through his mother he was a descendant of Sir Walter Raleigh. He convinced no one and eventually abandoned the quest.
* James Hargreaves, whose mechanical spinning jenny was destroyed by fearful proto-Luddites, and Samuel Crompton, whose spinning mule was a hybrid of its two predecessors, came only a little later.
* William Smith was born during the administration of the sixth and least distinguished, the duke of Grafton, who acted as caretaker between the administrations of William Pitt the Elder and Lord North.
† The radical politician in whose memory the famous actor Junius Brutus Booth named the son who would assassinate Abraham Lincoln in April 1865

Shears, sewing needles, and scrapers for converting animal skins into protective coverings for the body are among the oldest tools recovered from the Paleolithic age. To be sure, much of that innovation was utilitarian in nature. Ascots and hoop skirts aside, most clothing has some functional value, and certainly our ancestors fifty thousand years ago were making clothes with the explicit aim of keeping warm and dry and protected from potential threats. The fact that so much technological innovation—from the first knitting needles to hand looms to the spinning jenny—has emerged out of textile production can seem, at first glance, more a matter of necessity’s invention. And yet the archeological record is replete with early examples of purely decorative toolmaking: a shell necklace discovered in the Sikul Cave in Israel was crafted more than a hundred thousand years ago. As soon as humans became toolmakers, they were making jewelry.
Whatever mix of playfulness and practicality drove early human garment design, the invention of Tyrian purple announced a fundamental shift toward delight and surprise—a shift, in a sense, from function to fashion.

According to eyewitness reports one of the crowd ran towards the
armed soldiers, shouting: ‘I would rather be killed here than go home to starve’.
His wish was granted.
The troops prevented that march from reaching the bigger industrial centres of Rochdale and Manchester, where it might have inflamed a serious
insurrection. According to some estimates investment in the Manchester cotton mills had reached £20 million as early as 1816. The owners of capital had
a lot at stake. The Lancashire inventors of the mule, Samuel Crompton, the
spinning jenny, Richard Hargreaves, and the flying shuttle, John Kay, found
themselves under personal attack. Kay had to flee the mob, Crompton was
burnt out of his home.
Jeremy Rifkin has launched no physical assaults on today’s equivalents of
the cotton barons, men such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, but he makes it clear
that he thinks computers are to blame for depriving people of work. In his
book, one of the most dangerous and misleading economic tracts published
in the past quarter century, he predicts that 90 million jobs out of a US labour
force of 124 million are vulnerable to replacement by robots and computers.

pages: 293words: 91,412

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View
by
John Kenneth Galbraith

Most important, in all the earlier stages of development there was no close and predictable correlation between the supply of educated men and the nature of their training and the rate of technological innovation. Inventions were more often the result of brilliant flashes of insight than the product of long prepared training and development. The Industrial Revolution in England was ushered in by the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay, the spinning jenny by James Hargreaves, the spinning frame by (presumptively) Richard Arkwright and, of course, by James Watt's steam engine. These represented vast improvements in the capital which was being put to industrial use. But only in the case of Watt could the innovation be related to previous education and preparation. Kay and Hargreaves were simple weavers with a mechanical turn of mind. Arkwright had been apprenticed as a boy as a barber and a wigmaker and was barely literate.

But increasing supply was not easy, because even the remotest Pennine valleys and Welsh marches were now thickly settled with the cottages of weavers and spinsters, transport was dear and some of the workers were earning good enough wages to take weekend holidays, occasionally even drinking their pay away till Monday night, preferring consumption to extra income. As the twentieth-century economist Colin Clark put it, ‘Leisure has a real value even to very poor people.’
So, stuck between booming demand and stalling supply, the putters-out and their suppliers were ripe customers for any kind of productivity-enhancing invention, and with such an incentive, the inventors soon obliged. John Kay’s flying shuttle, James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, Samuel Crompton’s mule – these were all just milestones on a continuous road of incrementally improving productivity. The jenny worked up to twenty times as fast as a spinning wheel and produced a more consistent yarn, but it was still operated entirely by human muscle power. Yet by 1800 the jenny was already obsolete, because the frame was several hundred times as fast.

HIGH TEA AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The second half of the eighteenth century spawned two fundamental social and economic transformations: the Industrial Revolution and the Sugared Tea Revolution that sloshed into being within it. Led by England, the Industrial Revolution recast primarily agricultural Europe into ever-urbanizing industrial societies fueled by capitalism, overseas trade, growing consumption and changing mores. Technological innovations, most notably the cotton gin, the spinning jenny and the steam engine, transformed how English cotton was produced. Historian David Landes provides this eloquent summary: “The abundance and variety of these innovations almost defy compilation, but they may be subsumed under three principles: the substitution of machines—rapid, regular, precise, tireless—for human skill and effort; the substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power, in particular, the introduction of engines for converting heat into work, thereby opening to man a new and almost unlimited supply of energy; the use of new and far more abundant raw materials, in particular, the substitution of mineral for vegetable or animal substances.

Freed of that pressure, we will turn our gifts toward that which inspires us—for more and more of us, that is the healing of society and the planet from the ravages of Separation. (If you still think that freedom from survival pressure will lead to dissipation and indolence, please go back and reread “The Will to Work” in Chapter 14.)
6. ECONOMIC DEGROWTH
Motivation: Over hundreds of years of inventing labor-saving devices, from the spinning jenny to the digital computer, we have at every turn chosen to consume more rather than to work less. This choice, driven by the money system, accompanied an accelerating drawdown of social and natural capital. Today, the option of accelerating consumption is no longer available to us. Absent the driving force of positive risk-free interest, economic growth will no longer be necessary to promote the flow of capital, and a degrowth economy will become feasible.

That model builds on the ‘Ricardian model of the labor market’, set out in Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, ‘Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings’, in Handbook of Labor Economics, Volume 4, Part B, ed. David Card and Orley Ashenfelter (2011), 1043–171.
28 The spirit of their anxieties is shared with the original nineteenth-century ‘Luddities’ (whose name derives from their declared support for Ned Ludd, an East Midlands weaver who smashed a set of framing machines in anger and in fear in the early tremors of the Industrial Revolution). The Luddites viewed James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny in the nineteenth century with the same anxious suspicion that today’s pessimists view Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web in the twenty-first century. See Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (2001).
29 David Autor, ‘Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth’, NBER Working Paper 20485, National Bureau of Economic Research (2014).
30 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014).

Just a dozen years after the passage of the act of 1721, John Kay perfected the flying shuttle, which doubled weavers' productivity. This served to increase the demand for thread, whose spinning was more difficult to mechanize. In 1738, Lewis Paul and John Wyatt patented the first mechanical spinning machine, but no commercially feasible device became available until the mid-1760s, when such machines were invented by James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, and Samuel Crompton. (These were, respectively, the spinning jenny, the water frame, and the mule, the latter so-called because it was a hybrid of the first two.)55
As the economic historian Eric Hobsbawm famously said, "Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton." The new machines that were the heart of the great transformation made redundant untold thousands of spinners and weavers, who engaged in spasms of "machine breaking" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before finally disappearing into the new mills.56 (The term "Luddite" derives from the probably fictional leader of the machine-breaking riots in the 1810s, Ned Ludd.)

He knew how far Sybil Gerard had fallen, that she had been an educated girl, with airs and graces, as good as any gentry girl, once.
From the days of her father's fame, from her girlhood, Sybil could remember Mick Radley's like. She knew the kind of boy that he had been. Ragged angry factory-boys, penny-a-score, who would crowd her father after his torchlight speeches, and do whatever he commanded. Rip up railroad tracks, kick the boiler-plugs out of spinning jennies, lay policemen's helmets by his feet. She and her father had fled from town to town, often by night, living in cellars, attics, anonymous rooms-to-let, hiding from the Rad police and the daggers of other conspirators. And sometimes, when his own wild speeches had filled him with a burning elation, her father would embrace her and soberly promise her the world. She would live like gentry in a green and quiet England, when King Steam was wrecked.

But there is a problem with the linear model: in most areas of human development, it severely underestimates the role of bottom-up testing and learning of the kind adopted by the Unilever biologists. In his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, Terence Kealey, a practicing scientist, debunks the conventional narrative surrounding the Industrial Revolution:
In 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which mechanized weaving, and in 1770 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which as its name implies, mechanized spinning. These major developments in textile technology, as well as those of Wyatt and Paul (spinning frame, 1758), Arkwright (water frame, 1769), presaged the Industrial Revolution, yet they owed nothing to science; they were empirical developments based on the trial, error and experimentation of skilled craftsmen who were trying to improve the productivity, and so the profits, of their factories.5
Note the final sentence: these world-changing machines were developed, like Unilever’s nozzle, through trial and error.

The old Soviet Union
was admired even by many economists — an instance of a “cultural
contradiction of capitalism,” in which ideas permitted by the successes of
innovation rise up to kill the innovation. We should resist it.
338
Chapter 32:
It was Not Allocation, but Language
The main economic puzzle with the explanations of the Age of
Innovation proposed so far is that they assume that, until 1750 and the
wave of gadgets sweeping over England, opportunities for profit were
simply ignored. As I’ve said now repeatedly, that’s not economically
reasonable. If the spinning jenny was such a swell idea in 1764 C.E., why
was it not in 1264, or 264, or for that matter in 1264 B.C.E.? If factories
extracted surplus value in 1848, why not in 1148? Thus the economic
puzzle of the Industrial Revolution.
The other, historical puzzle, as I’ve also noted repeatedly, is that
many of the so-called preconditions (high savings rates, lots of
international trade, private property, science) happened long before, and
in other places than northwestern Europe.

They had much more privacy at the mill than on the farm, and compared to mill work, farmwork was dirty, brutally hard, and often dangerous. Farm life could also be isolating, and the girls seem to have taken great delight in meeting and living with so many girls of their own age. It’s no surprise that most of them seem to have remembered the mills with fondness.
The first Waltham mill started operations in February 1815 with twenty-three yarn-making machines—carders, rovers, and spinning jennies of various kinds—and twenty-one looms, seven wide and fourteen narrow ones. The initial machinery was rapidly added to, replaced, and rebuilt, as operations expanded and Moody piled on his process improvements. One of Nathan Appleton’s firms, a wholesale distributorship, took care of the marketing at a modest 1 percent of sales.
It was hardly an auspicious time for a textile venture. If 1812 had been a bad time to embark on a new venture, 1815 may have been the worst possible time to open a new mill.

Nor did Western Europe enjoy a decisive advantage over China and Japan before 1800 in terms of capital stock or economic institutions, with plenty of Chinese companies being organized along joint-stock lines. Even in technology, there appears to have been little to choose between Europe and China, and in some fields, like irrigation, textile weaving and dyeing, medicine and porcelain manufacture, the Europeans were behind. China had long used textile machines that differed in only one key detail from the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle which were to power Britain’s textile-led Industrial Revolution. China had long been familiar with the steam engine and had developed various versions of it; compared with James Watt’s subsequent invention, the piston needed to turn the wheel rather than the other way round.6 What is certainly true, however, is that once Britain embarked on its Industrial Revolution, investment in capital- and energy-intensive processes rapidly raised productivity levels and created a virtuous circle of technology, innovation and growth that was able to draw on an ever-growing body of science in which Britain enjoyed a significant lead over China.7 For China, in contrast, its ‘industrious revolution’ did not prove the prelude to an industrial revolution.

The urban fabric of modern Hong Kong was knit following the end of China’s civil war in 1949, which sent two million refugees streaming across its border with little more than the shirts on their backs— appropriate, considering Shanghai’s fleeing capitalists underwrote its first textile factories. Textiles are the bottom rung of industrial economies. Britain’s woolen mills were the first to be mechanized in the eighteenth century by the flying shuttle and spinning jenny, and the first to be copied on cut-rate American looms. Hong Kong followed in their foot-steps until Deng’s Reform and Opening in 1978, when its reservoir of cheap labor was undercut by the bottomless one pooling in Shenzhen.
The Delta was built with Hong Kong’s jobs and Hong Kong’s dollars. By the early 1990s, the territory’s budding industrialists had spent $40 billion in China, two-thirds of its total foreign investment.

Kealey presents a convincing—very convincing—argument that the steam engine emerged from preexisting technology and was created by uneducated, often isolated men who applied practical common sense and intuition to address the mechanical problems that beset them, and whose solutions would yield obvious economic reward.
Now, second, consider textile technologies. Again, the main technologies that led to the jump into the modern world owe, according to Kealey, nothing to science. “In 1733,” he writes, “John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which mechanized weaving, and in 1770 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which as its name implies, mechanized spinning. These major developments in textile technology, as well as those of Wyatt and Paul (spinning frame, 1758), Arkwright (water frame, 1769), presaged the Industrial Revolution, yet they owed nothing to science; they were empirical developments based on the trial, error, and experimentation of skilled craftsmen who were trying to improve the productivity, and so the profits, of their factories.”

Since our experience of the new is shaped by our recent past, I think the answers to these basic questions could be helped by a brief reminder of the historical record of the industrial revolution, still present in our institutions, and therefore in our mind-set.
Lessons from the Industrial Revolution
Historians have shown that there were at least two industrial revolutions: the first started in the last third of the eighteenth century, characterized by new technologies such as the steam engine, the spinning jenny, the Cort’s process in metallurgy, and, more broadly, by the replacement of hand-tools by machines; the second one, about 100 years later, featured the development of electricity, the internal combustion engine, science-based chemicals, efficient steel casting, and the beginning of communication technologies, with the diffusion of the telegraph and the invention of the telephone. Between the two there are fundamental continuities, as well as some critical differences, the main one being the decisive importance of scientific knowledge in sustaining and guiding technological development after 1850.22 It is precisely because of their differences that features common to both may offer precious insights in understanding the logic of technological revolutions.

Friedrich von Knauss (1724–89) invented a mechanical hand that wrote on a piece of paper just like a living hand; he also constructed the first typewriter.38 The Industrial Revolution would depend on the skills of such men, skills that would have been familiar to the craftsmen who built the first Strasbourg Cathedral clock. The Scientific Revolution started as a revolution of the mathematicians; it would eventually turn into a revolution of the mechanics. There is a direct line of descent from the Strasbourg clock to the spinning jenny.
This brings us back to the problem with which we began. The Strasbourg clock was built in the middle of the fourteenth century – but the mechanical philosophy was invented three centuries later. Machines did not change much in the meantime, but philosophers did. Once Lucretius was available (he was rediscovered in 1417), his concept of the machina mundi could be turned into a quite new idea, the idea of a clockwork universe.